The field names (column names) must be exact. The first column must be "Employee". The second column must be "Benefit Type". Column names are not case sensitive and ignore extra spaces.

The report contains each employee's name, start date, tenure, and hours worked, as well as the available, earned, used, and lost hours for each benefit type. This file may be modified and imported using the "Benefits Import/Update" section of the page.

TIP: To edit a .csv file, we recommend a spreadsheet application such as Excel™ or OpenOffice.org Calc.

Importing

You may use an exported Benefits file to enter your Benefits information or use the Benefits Import File Layout to create your own file. The following must be met:

The field names (column names) must be exact. You may delete unneeded columns. The first column must be "Employee". If you have multiple employees with the same name, use a "Badge Number" column as the unique identifier for employees on the import. (If present, the "Badge Number" field will be given priority over the "Employee" field to identify the employee on the row.) The remaining columns may be in any order. Column names are not case sensitive and ignore extra spaces.

To identify an employee on import, the system looks for three fields in order:

"SSN" field. If present, the SSN will be given first priority in identifying the employee for the benefit import. This is not on the export for security reasons, but can be added to the import to ensure the correct identification of an employee when multiple employees have identical names.

"Badge Number" field. If present, the Badge Number will be given the next priority in identifying the employee for the import.

"Employee" field. If SSN and Badge Number are blank or match no employees, then the name will be used to try to identify the employee for the import. TimeIPS will attempt to match the Employee's last name and first name exactly and middle name if specified.

If the employee cannot be identified, an error will be shown.

IMPORTANT: Even if identifying employees by SSN or Badge Number, the "Employee" column must be the first column in order for the file to be recognized as a valid benefits import (or IAPI transaction).

All the other columns on the export, such as worked hours, total used, lost, etc. are optional, only informational and are not used by TimeIPS when importing.

When importing benefit levels, only the "Available" columns (for example, "Sick Available" and "Vacation Available") are used. For each "Available" column, a corresponding "Effective" column must also be filled with a date (for example 10/1/2009) that tells TimeIPS when the new benefit total becomes effective. The Available and Effective pair is equivalent to a Benefit Reset option, meaning that you have created a set-point where accruals will begin at the level specified on the date effective and calculate forward from that point.

On systems with IPSBEN, additional benefit types will be exported/imported in sets of columns similar to Sick and Vacation